JP and BMitch ask AP Sports writer Steve Whyno if he believes the Washington Capitals can make a run to the Stanley Cup Final.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00They put up 15 goals in two games. They're scoring touchdowns in a league that scores
00:05field goals. Yeah. How good is this caps team? How much does maybe that rest of not going
00:11during the four nations help them?
00:13Speaker 4 And it's going to help really a lot, a lot long-term. And I talked to peer
00:17Luke Dubois about this last week and he said, it might take a period or two to sort of get
00:20the rust off because none of these players were involved in that tournament and sort
00:25of kind of getting back into game form. But you, you saw that in the penguins game, it
00:29maybe took a half a period before sort of the floodgates open on all that scoring. And
00:34I guess Alex has actually got jealous of everyone else scoring the goals against Pittsburgh
00:37that he had to pump in three yesterday against Edmonton. And, and no, this team is really
00:41good guys. And I don't, I don't know. I think everyone's yes. Are they a cup contender?
00:46Are they, can they win the Stanley cup? Sure they can. I absolutely at this point, you
00:50have to believe this team is that good. There are top of the league standings. The Eastern
00:55conference is wide open. You've got Matthew. I still think part of the part of Panthers
00:58are, are the team to beat full stop. But Matthew is dealing with this injury. We don't
01:02know how them playing four rounds of playoffs the last two years are going to affect it,
01:07but you've got house of action scoring.
01:09You've got great goaltending from, from Logan Thompson and Charlie Lindgren. Just Jacob
01:12trickery has been a godsend for, for this team. And they really, he's going to get paid
01:17and they need to figure out an extension sooner than later, I think for him. But this is a,
01:21this is a team that everything Brian McClellan did last offseason for bringing him pure look
01:25to bar and Logan Thompson, Jacob tricker, and all of that. Andrew Monty, a Pawnee sort
01:29of like making up for the losses of Nicholas Baxter and TJ Oshie. I'm getting his net up.
01:33It's just worked incredibly well to the, to the point where everybody in Montreal, I talked
01:38to is like, how are the caps? That's good. It's all Brian McClellan.
01:40I'm going to preface this. So there were times in the past and I would watch the caps play
01:46and I watch players be spectators just like we were. I like the fans watching Ovi do his
01:52thing. When they score eight goals and Ovi doesn't score one, what does that tell you?
01:58And what does that, what message does that give the rest of the league?
02:00It's, it's, it's incredible that the scoring gaps that the capitals have right now. And,
02:04and, and, and just you don't, that the fact that they don't need to win and the fact that
02:09they can win games by in different ways, like they, they can score six, seven, eight goals
02:15and win last year. This is a team that had to win two, one, three, two, because the offense
02:20just wasn't getting it done. And, and so they had to sort of scrimp by and, and win a certain
02:25way. Now they're almost playing with their food a little bit and sort of trying to win
02:30games different ways and experimenting. And the next almost two months is going to be
02:34fascinating to see how they almost experiment with things to try to figure out how to peak
02:40when, when it matters to kind of sort of play their best in the playoffs after this.
02:45Cause we've seen so many great regular seasons around here, other than 2018, all of them ended
02:49in first or second round losses that it shows that, that there's a lot of depth on this team
02:56and that Spencer Carberry is probably will be coach of the year.
02:59I do. I said to be earlier, I feel like Carberry is going to be coaching in the four nations soon.
03:05Like, like he just seems like such a star on the rise and I get that he's young and maybe,
03:11you know, it doesn't have the playoff wins yet, but it sure seems like they might be coming this
03:15year. Yeah. Yeah. And he, he really is. And, and, and the Capitol saw this, uh, give,
03:19give credit to Brian McClellan in the front office that, that three or four years ago,
03:23even when Peter Lobbio was coaching here and Spencer Carberry was in Hershey, I think they
03:26sort of envisioned him as their, their sort of coaching waiting. And he went to Toronto
03:31for a couple of years and served as assistant with the Maple Leafs. And they, they, they got
03:34lucky that they didn't lose them to another job, but they knew right away what this guy can do.
03:38And, and he's just, he's so good at adjusting to the team. He has, he gets hired last season
03:44and says, we're going to play fast. Then he realized that he has a slow old team,
03:47can't play fast. So he says, we gotta, we gotta lock it down and play a different way.
03:51And then they're not scoring. So he says, okay, we're going to put more pucks to the net and it
03:55works every sort of button. He knows that he pushes with players works. And I agree. He's,
04:01he's the second youngest coach in the NHL right now. And certainly with more experience, getting
04:06a chance to coach in the playoffs last year against the Rangers, getting a chance to coach
04:09in the playoffs again, this spring is only going to add to sort of his, his whole resume.